Often a mission wants a family to come to us for counseling, but the family doesn't want to. While we have had lots of success stories with these people who felt they were dragged to us, I have wondered about the “legality” of this push to get help…

Brent, your question about the “march the employee out the door” termination raises a couple of interesting points, and follows on from a thought-provoking discussion I had with a colleague who works in the large corporate setting.

When you do fire someone, how do you deal with the trauma of sudden termination? I want to speak as a caregiver about something I have observed. Sometimes, we have to fire staff without warning. In the typical scenario...

Let’s talk about policies—the types of policies you should have and how people can report without either personnel or the company running into problems with retaliation. Your conduct and discipline policies should also prohibit retaliation, and a separate whistle-blower policy is a good idea. An important piece in avoiding sticky situations is to have a complaint or grievance procedure.

Although it doesn’t have much independent value as a precedent, a recent case is an eerie factual copycat of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, an employment law case that applied the constitutional ministerial exception doctrine. Herzog v. St. Peter Lutheran, an August 2012 memorandum opinion out of the federal Northern District of Illinois, faithfully applies the Hosanna-Tabor principles to a similar set of facts.

The disciplinary process for erring employees is intertwined with statutory provisions. You may become involved with the Civil Rights Division or the EEOC, even as a religious organization. Whether you can address issues internally and independent of government oversight depends partly on your policies and agreements.

Can you have a union at a religious college? Only if the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) can exercise its jurisdiction over faculty members. NLRB has tried to do this several times. Shortly before Christmas in 2014, the NLRB developed a new test that lets it take jurisdiction over the faculty at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU).

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